MINA SMITH, WRITER & CREATOR

It's always a balancing act. You have to exercise, you have to work, you have to cook healthy meals, you have to relax, you have to meditate, you have to spend time with friends, and you have to learn to do all of these things.

"It's just a balancing act." Just a balancing act? Do you know what a balancing act is? Picture a woman in the circus on a unicycle, doing tricks while she juggles and balances a toddler on each shoulder. Imagine someone is throwing a knife at her and she has to catch it in her teeth.

That is a balancing act. Things hang precariously all over you, and dropping the ball on one thing messes up the rest. Once the juggling goes awry, you have to catch the toddlers as they teeter off of your shoulders, falling off of the cycle and getting a knife in the back.

I sat at the table across from my best friend, chewing idly on a bunless turkey burger, and wondering what they put in it, and what they cooked it in. It could be the perfect thing to eat, but it could also ruin the dieta I had built for myself depending on whether I was tasting olive or canola oil in the seared flesh of my turkey. I no longer called my diet a "diet;" the English word diet was too full of fad things and days of nothing but frozen pears and lemon water. Diets are all meat and no veggies, diets are six meals a day of cabbage soup, diets were eating cotton balls or indigestible noodles. Diets were the inability to keep it up, and the failure of knowing the next best thing had failed you. And the guilt of knowing you had failed the next best thing.

"Why aren't you eating bread?" My best friend asked, leaning closer.

"I had two pieces of bread to day already, and I'm saving some carbs so we can share a dessert," I answered, smiling. My dieta was a balancing act, but it was one I could keep to. I had replaced the unicycle with high heeled shoes, and the balancing toddlers with parrots that could stand on their own. I occasionally caught the knife between my teeth, but sometimes, I got hit right behind the ear. Good thing the knife was now plastic.

Plants had replaced almost everything in my daily intake, and everything else was as unprocessed as possible. Except for the dessert, which I would enjoy every bite of, slowly, and then rinse my mouth out with plenty of water to reduce the film of desire for more sugar around the inside of my mouth. The remnants of sugar on my tongue is what usually did me in; when the flavor was gone, I no longer wanted more.

It was a vast improvement in my relationship with food, which was a positive step in a number of steps I'd been trying to get healthier. Good thing I have excellent balance.

All stories and articles, etc here are written and copyright me unless otherwise stated. All photos are either mine, and copyrighted, or they are from FreeImages.com, a free stock image site. Visit them and support them, for they are awesome.